Irma Leal leads restaurant through 60 delicious years in West Texas

BEN EGEL

Tuesday

Aug 1, 2017 at 10:41 AM

Irma Leal peered out of the car window, terrified of the looming skyscrapers towering above her. This wasn’t what she had signed up for, she told her husband, Jesse, when she agreed to move from the Rio Grande Valley town of Mercedes to Muleshoe in 1955.

She needn’t worry about getting lost in a big city, Jesse replied. Those buildings were grain elevators.

Little did Irma know, she and her husband would go on to found the most-recognized business in their new town.

Leal’s Mexican Restaurant celebrates its 60th birthday this year, another milestone for one of the oldest surviving Tex-Mex restaurants in the state.

The Leals now boast six restaurants in the South Plains, Panhandle and Clovis, New Mexico, plus a factory that ships wholesale tortillas to grocery stores in Texas, Colorado and New Mexico.

It all started on the Texas-Mexico border 97 years ago when Irma’s mother and father rode into the United States from Mexico on horseback..

The pair spent the Great Depression and World War II delivering corn tortillas to Chicanos living in Mercedes, giving away about half to those who couldn’t afford them.

One of eight children in a single-paycheck household, Jesse Leal, known to Spanish speakers as "Chuy," was a gratis recipient. A neighborly friendship eventually blossomed into a romantic relationship following Irma’s high school graduation, and the two married on Nov. 24, 1955, just before moving to Muleshoe.

Jesse worked his way up to an office job with the federal Bracero Program, which afforded Mexican nationals the legal right to work on American farms from 1942-64. A promotion to regional manager pulled him to Muleshoe, where Irma got a job at the C.R. Anthony department store. But she saw the braceros going without access to traditional dishes, and that didn’t sit right.

"I had been making tortillas as long as I could remember at home. Then, when I came to Muleshoe, the nearest competition was Lubbock, but they were two or three days old," Irma said. "I said, ‘If only I had a real tortilla machine like we did at home (in Mercedes).’ "

Irma and Jesse had saved $750 over two years to put toward a down payment on a house. A mill and tortilla machine cost $750 as well. The choice was easy. The couple bought the tortilla machine and set to work in a tin building on the east side of town, turning about 200 pounds of corn per day into savory discs.

Today, their son Sergio uses a more modern machine to churn through 3,000 pounds of corn per day.

Another factory in Dallas run by their son Abel packages tortilla chips and hot sauce sold at grocery stores in Colorado, New Mexico and Texas.

The braceros’ contracts mandated employers take them into town one day per week for entertainment and shopping. When they came into town, they headed straight for Jesse’s shop.

Leal’s menudo, tortillas and barbacoa were instant hits among the laborers visiting town on the weekend. When they returned to the fields, however, business dried up.

Thus began Jesse’s routine of driving tamales, tortillas and miscellaneous goods such as cigarettes and magazines out to farms two or three times per week. There, he got to know the owners as well as the braceros.

The next time the farmers were waiting to drive their workers back to the farms after a Saturday in town, Jesse would bring a small plate of tacos out to them.

That led to the owners walking inside for more, sitting down next to their farmhands at a time when signs banning Latinos still hung from restaurants in towns such as Dimmitt.

"Dad was like this bridge between the two communities," said Victor, who now owns the Muleshoe and Amarillo Leal’s locations. "The farmers loved him. … He literally educated people on eating Mexican food."

As Robb Walsh wrote in "The Tex-Mex Cookbook," the cuisine has long had a reputation of being an insincere imitation — the bland, Americanized version of dishes south of the border.

"Among food snobs, there’s sort of a preference for authentic Mexican because someone told them they’re supposed to like it," Walsh said from the kitchen of his El Real Tex-Mex restaurant in Houston. "But people in the rest of the country don’t have any idea what authentic really is.

"Things like nachos, margaritas, chips and salsa, fajitas, those are all Tex-Mex. But if you go to a place that doesn’t have things like that in Texas, it won’t survive, even if it’s the most authentic (Mexican) restaurant out there."

Walsh reviewed Leal’s along with a handful of other historic eateries for a 2008 Houston Press column titled "Temples of Tex-Mex." Nine years later, he remembers the "wonderful seasoned tortilla chips" and the tortilla factory farther down American Boulevard, as well as the use of red chiles typically seen in Eastern New Mexico.

The Leals and Walsh reconnected in 2015 when Irma received Foodways Texas’ Lifetime Achievement Award at the nonprofit’s annual symposium in San Antonio.

It’s the classic American dream story: a family immigrates to the U.S., works hard, starts their own business and creates opportunities for the next generation.

But keeping the family business intact can prove difficult when that generation takes advantage of their circumstances.

Nearly all of Irma’s grandchildren have broken away from the restaurants in favor of forging their own path or are currently in school with no guarantees they will follow in their parents’ footsteps.

The most prominent example is Victor’s son Roman, who took a job at Roasters Coffee &Tea 10 years ago and founded Evocation Coffee a year later, though he’s talked about putting on the gloves again when the time is right.

"I’m extremely proud to be part of the Leal family," he said. "It’s given me a different perspective of what I’m capable of, with all these titans of the Tex-Mex industry all around me."

Another grandchild runs a bakery out of her home. One works for Suddenlink Communications in Denton. One is studying to become a chiropractor.

That leaves Laura Leal worried. All of her siblings learned the same techniques in the kitchen, then added individual flair in their own restaurants. If each of them trains someone outside the family to take over, the differences may become even more pronounced.

"There are several that say they’d like to get in on the business or take over one of the restaurants, but there’s no guarantee because they’re off studying," said Laura, who owns the Clovis restaurants. "We’re hoping that some of them will continue the legacy."

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